Competent and good are not synonyms. Smart and good are not synonyms. Evil and competent are not synonyms. Virtues are not all moral virtues. Bravery is a morally neutral virtue. It makes bad people worse, and good people better and without it all virtues and vices are nearly meaningless. Competence is morally neutral. It is […]

I must be mad. Blame it on Titli Nihaan or Lambert. I swore an oath when I moved into this new house that there would be raised beds. I have a lot of yard and lots of sunshine. There’s no reason why I can’t put some of it to agricultural use. So, I watched a lot of YouTube videos and thought, that can’t be so hard.

Will let you know if any of it comes to fruition. Ha-ha! Get it? Ok, nevermind. I’m exhausted. You don’t even want to know what I had to do to get that soil from my driveway to the backyard. And surprise, surprise! There’s no outside tap for my hose in the backyard. Nooooo, that would be too easy. I have to hook together two hoses from my front yard.

Anyway, this whole ordeal has meant I have had to exercise my project planning and carry thru skills. I’m out of practice. It was challenging. And since Brook is still in NJ finishing up school, she wasn’t here to help. But I have a pair of gardening gloves just for her when she finally gets here. Bwahahahahahahaaaahhhh!

Don’t let the shadiness fool you. Late afternoon is the only time this part of the yard gets shade.

See, I would relocate if I liked hostas. But I don’t. Maybe a few here and there are Ok but I don’t want them to be the feature of every fricking flower bed. I’m not sure I’m conveying the whole hosta situation adequately. Imagine Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors replicating herself all around the house and then growing to gigantic proportions. I’m not really in the mood to relocate. I’m more in the ripping the fuckers out stage. Even if I only remove half of them, there will still be an overabundance of hostas.

Ok, I’ve already got 8 zukes I can’t eat. Getting behind on kale, cabbage, oregano and chard. Only one tomato so far, but I expect more soon. The snails have wiped out the beans. Anyone wanna buy some zucchini?

There’s a great true story about a black woman in Mississippi who was determined to win the prize for the best lawn in town. She bought two truckloads of topsoil and put her two teen aged boys to work. Eddie and Walter loaded soil into wheel barrows, carted it, unloaded it, spread it, seeded it, watered it and spent their whole summer working.

At the end of the summer, each of the boys had added 20 pounds of muscle. Mrs. Payton won the prize. The boys suddenly were football stars. Each not only got college scholarships but played in the NFL. Walter held the pro record for most career yards rushing for decades despite being only 5 feet ten and 198 pounds. He was never the fastest guy either but even more to Mrs. Payton’s credit, one of the greatest football players ever was universally known as Sweetness for his sunny personality.

I’ve always felt that the story has Tom Sawyer possibilities in a football crazy area like, say, western Pennsylvania.

Body: Last week I went down to Washington, D.C. to deliver a paper at a conference in the technical field where I worked, ten years or so and two or three careers ago, before the dot.com trash. The trip was solely an exercise in merit-making, since I doubt very much I'll get work in the field, but reconnecting with old friends was really great -- even […]

"Barrett Brown has been released from prison; WikiLeaks publishes to celebrate: Today, investigative journalist Barrett Brown has been released from FCI Three Rivers to a halfway house outside Dallas, earlier than initially scheduled. His parents picked him up from the federal prison to drive him six hours to his new residence. Brown's release come […]